Access Together

Crowd-sourcing community accessibility with your computer and mobile phone. Make your community more accessible.

The story

History

In Winter 2011, Access Together received two awards, ‘Runner Up’ & ‘Most Replicable App’ from the FCC and Knight Foundation's Apps for Communities contest.Access Together uses crowd-sourcing to collect community accessibility information, this allows any person to use their mobile phone or computer to add access information about local businesses and services in their neighborhood. Information collected is then available to the Access Together community.Access Together was created in mid 2011 as a tool for collecting, displaying and acting on community accessibility data. The idea for Access Together was sparked at the New York Hall of Science during a discussion about human abilities, after several accessibility related stories of navigating around cities using a wheelchair it was said “I wish I could tell people about the access issues at…”.

Availability of Accessibility

The questions on Access Together are flexible - we want to hear from you if there is a question that could improve the quality of accessibility information collected for your neighborhood.Using a mobile phone or computer, users can answer accessibility questions related to the type of business or service, for example, a cafe would have slightly different questions than a museum. Most questions are related to the availability of accessible amenities and features. The questions are organized by disability including, wheelchair and mobility, blind and low vision, deaf and hard of hearing, sensory friendliness and seniors.